Pharmacopeias for Accredited Agents of Poisoning
DATE 2019
MEDIUM Installation, Participatory Workshop
MEDIUM Installation, Participatory Workshop
EXHIBITIONS
Storyfest: Make Believe
21 June – 24 June 2019
The Arts House, Singapore
PRESS & COMMENTARY
Myth, Magic and Memoirs at Storytelling Festival︎︎︎
by Olivia Ho
The Straits Times
Storyfest: Make Believe
21 June – 24 June 2019
The Arts House, Singapore
PRESS & COMMENTARY
Myth, Magic and Memoirs at Storytelling Festival︎︎︎
by Olivia Ho The Straits Times
Review of StoryFest 2019: Make Believe︎︎︎
by Bakchormeeboy
DESCRIPTION
The work takes its title from John Gimlette’s 1915 text ‘Malay Poisons and Charm Cures’ where he writes, “Malay women are generally held to be the accredited agents, at any rate, in many cases of poisoning, because naturally the cooking is left almost entirely to them.”
The work takes its title from John Gimlette’s 1915 text ‘Malay Poisons and Charm Cures’ where he writes, “Malay women are generally held to be the accredited agents, at any rate, in many cases of poisoning, because naturally the cooking is left almost entirely to them.”
Composed from speculative histories, embodied experiences, folkloric narratives and shapeshifting conjectures, this installation speaks of and to the mythologies and cultural histories of women standing between life and death, fate and agency, healing and killing, magic and mayhem, the monstrous and the murderous.
Through revisiting myths of women from and beyond the Nusantara, this work intends to respond to and problematise the tropes and archetypal representations of certain gendered bewitching and bewitched non-conforming bodies that have been demonised and (dis)enchanted through time.